Brexit Angst, Ireland, Impotence And All That

A couple of months ago, I was all 'Brexit, meh', especially when I tried to register to vote in the referendum and was informed I was ineligible because I've lived overseas more than 15 years.

Yup. Disenfranchised. I suddenly and inexplicably feel like throwing myself under a race horse.

It's incredible how disempowering the Internet can be when it's put in the hands of British civil servants. The language is all 'Right, guys, let's help you out here' and the stark reality is Colditz.

Over the last few weeks I have become increasingly concerned. And my feeling of absolute impotence has nothing to do with the fact that my minuscule vote, my only puny weapon in this pointless game that's been labelled 'democracy', has been torn away from me. It's that I genuinely believe my countrymen are stupid enough to vote to leave the EU and it's giving me the thundering heebie-geebies.

Sarah and I started looking at the consequences for us, for starters. We own property in the UK mainland and Northern Ireland. Sarah's Irish. I'm English. We face the very real prospect of a 'hard' border being established between Ireland and Northern Ireland as a result of Brexit.

Take a second to let that sink in. Never has Ireland been so united in the past two centuries as it is today. Irish people - as well as British people and, in fact, European people - are free to move around, settle in, shop in and generally live in the whole of Ireland. If we Brexit, that'll end. There'll be a border between North and South for the first time since Mo Mowlam whipped those churlish boys into shape as she was dying of cancer.

Irish Premier Enda Kenny filed a neat piece in today's Guardian, where he points out that we enjoy a WEEKLY trade of some £900 million between our two nations. Ireland is the only land border the UK has with another EU country. When that border becomes a real one, with cameras, customs officers and troops and stuff, we'll be plunged back to the North/South divide. That trade will be monumentally disrupted. All that tosh about £350 million a week to Europe pales in comparison, even if it were a true and a fair picture which it most certainly is not.

A hard border across Ireland? Where we've been busily tearing down walls for the past twenty-odd years? We'll be back to the Troubles faster than you can say A Decent Bomber*. Ireland will once again become partitioned and divided. A two-state solution imposed on a workable, wobbly but tenable one-state compromise. Neat.

I'm told there are something like a million Irish people living and working in London alone. Something like 5.5 million people in Britain are of Irish origin. One of our early 'migrant communities' they have enriched our nation and integrated into our society so much that we're practically mates these days. That's quite the miracle, 'cos when I was growing up, they were Paddies and they were stupid. We're over that now and we've learned to rub along a way lot better than we did in the days of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish'. I'd say there's a degree of mutual respect and even camaraderie these days. Even if 1847 does still tend to crop up now and then...

As Kenny says of Ireland and the UK in the context of our respective roles in Europe, "The UK and Ireland are like-minded on EU matters, and the process of working together in Brussels has built an immense store of knowledge, personal relationships and trust between our governments."

It's interesting that across Europe, our forced multiculturalism is about chickens coming home to roost. The Germans have Turkish Gastarbeiters, the Dutch Indonesians, the French Pieds Noirs and we British, we have Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians, Caribbeans and Irish. Dominion it seems is a two ways street. It's funny how we created, or colluded in the creation of, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and yet we're so squeamish about accepting the consequences of our export of violence and terror. We, of all people, should have learned. When you break other people's countries, their vulnerable come to you for help.

So we're not exactly bullish on this Brexit thing. There are a lot of other reasons why Europe has been very good to the UK and continues to be a good thing. But this one aspect of a highly complex argument alone is enough to have us running scared. The rest of it, if you're even vaguely interested, I'll be chatting about on tomorrow's Business Breakfast show on Dubai Eye Radio from around 08.20am Dubai Time. You can stream it live by following that there link.

*See what I did there?

A Decent Bomber And The Wilfulness of Characters

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.

   He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.

   'Can you hear me Mister Quinlan?’ Mist Air Queen Larne ‘There has been a mistake. These men have been foolish. Do you understand?’

    Quinlan nodded. He could just make out the face peering into his own, a look of concern on the dark-skinned features. He tried to speak, his fat lips throbbed and tore, a stab of pain. ‘W-who?’

   ‘My name doesn’t matter, Mister Quinlan. Some call me The Accountant. It is but a conceit. You are safe, now. Tell me, who is the bomb maker, please? The one who made the big bombs?’

   Quinlan groaned. He tried to raise his head. ‘Big?’ He saw stars, felt a deep lassitude. The cold cloth was pressed to his brow again.

   ‘You remember? The bombs your people made for London and Manchester. People still talk of them. The very, very big bombs. Boom.’

   Christ, but that was twenty year and more ago! Quinlan wanted to say. But the cat had his tongue.

   ‘Come. You know who made them. Tell me his name, Mister Quinlan.’

   It came to him. Of course it did. Jesus, but that was Pat. Dear old Pat.

   ‘Pat,’ Quinlan croaked. ‘Pat O’Carolan.’

   ‘Where is he?’

   He tried to grin. Ah, these people. Stop, now. ‘Tipp. South Tipp.’ Another beautiful sip of water offered to his beaten lips.

   Bliss.

   ‘Where is Tip, please?’

   ‘Tipperary. The-the Republic.’ He was drooling, sloppy-mouthed. The pain clamoured, in and out of focus in waves, his battered nerves shrieked every time he moved his broken body.

   ‘And what is his code word?’

   ‘I-I don’t know any c-code—’

   The blow to his cheek came fast and with the hard edge of the man’s hand. Quinlan’s jaw crunched. Pain blossomed in his mouth, both old ache and new sharp. His tied arms stiffened and his bloody hands pulsed agony. He moaned and spat out a tooth.

   He sagged against his restraints, snivelling as he tried to breathe through the bloody mucus filling his nose and mouth. ‘Dan.’ He moaned. ‘Breen. Code word. Dan Breen. Danbreen.’

The opening scene of A Decent Bomber was actually the last piece of the book I wrote. The final pass of a number of edits, this one 'filled in' a number of scenes and events I had lazily passed over in the original writing. Sometimes it's these very events you take for granted which actually contain the most important bits in developing the book. In this case, the old version of the book opened with Pat hearing something in his yard and then two Irish Republican politicians discussing Quinlan's fate.

It wasn't enough. Quinlan had to get it, and bad, and we had to be there with him and share his treatment at the hands of some very bad people. I didn't know he had wee girls or a wife called Deirdre or that his mother had died, but somehow in the space of a couple of pages, Quinlan acquired these things (as well as a number of particularly nasty injuries). I did love Mist Air Queen Larne, too. I'm sure it's wrong to enjoy your own writing like this, a sort of literary onanism.

Similarly, Pat's niece Orla was never meant to have a girlfriend, a relationship that throws her life into turmoil. Orla had never considered herself to be you know, different and yet here she was falling for another girl she met at a party. This whole development was the last thing on my mind and I do not for the life of me know where it came from, it just happened. One minute she's on a train looking out of the window and twizzling her red hair, reflected in the window and then, bam, she's falling for another girl, trying to come to terms with this newly awakened sexuality and wondering how she's going to break the news to her Uncle Pat.

It's odd how these things can develop. That relationship, unintended in my original telling, becomes crucial to the story of A Decent Bomber. Orla, already in a state of considerable confusion, gets treated pretty badly in the scheme of things. Not only is she confronted by her strange feelings for another woman, she finds out her beloved uncle Pat isn't quite what he seemed to be. The rock and anchor she seeks in her new turbulence turns out to be a catalyst for complete chaos.

Boyle wriggled his way into the story as an uninvited guest as well. And nobody was as surprised at the way his love life turns out as I was. One minute he's in his office and the next my fingers had tapped out a scene that was the last thing from my mind. I actually sat back and questioned what the hell had just gone on there. I hadn't meant it to happen at all and then found myself having to deal with the consequences - just as Boyle must have had to have done.

Sometimes these things happen. Characters do stuff they're not supposed to, grow a life for themselves and make their own decisions. You just have to go along with it and let them do their thing. It often works out rather wonderfully - in Shemlan, for instance, it led to the whole glorious car chase across a frozen Baltic sea. I didn't even know the Baltic froze over, let alone that there were seasonal ice roads connecting the Estonian mainland with its islands. In A Decent Bomber, that unplanned relationship of Orla's ended up resolving the whole book.

What goes around comes around, in writing books as in life...

A Decent Bomber is currently available on Amazon.com and all decent book outlets on pre-order, publishing on November 5th 2015. Go and do it now, don't put it off. You know it makes sense...

Uncle Pat And Decent Bombing

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The phone rang. For some reason its peal stilled him. He lifted the handset slowly. The sacred heart lamp was guttering. He’d have to get a new one next time he went down the road.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice on the line had a hint of American. ‘This is Patrick O’Carolan?’

  ‘It is, sure.’

  ‘Hello, Mr O’Carolan. Your code word is Dan Breen. Could you confirm you understand me?’

  There was something else under the American note in the voice, a hint of something deep and dark. Pat’s tongue felt double the size, his voice thick. ‘Yes.’ Damn his hesitancy, it sounded like he had a stutter. He mustered his wits; his eyes squeezed shut to block out the nightmares of the past. ‘Yes, I confirm.’ As he spoke, his mind shrieked: No, tell them no. Tell them you don’t know what the fuck they’re on about and to leave me and my niece alone.

It all started with Sarah's uncle Pat. He's a mild-mannered, gentle man who keeps a small herd of milk cows on a wee farm up on the margins of the Cummermore Bog in South Tipperary. He likes tea. As a younger man, he was a bit of a Republican. The Irish kind, not the looney gun-totin' American type. Being a bit 'green' as a lad hardly marks you out in South Tipperary, you understand.

I've long teased Sarah with dark mutterings about how uncle Pat's sitting on an IRA arms cache. It's amusingly incongruous if you know Pat.

And then one day it hit me. Hang on. What if he WAS? And what if bad people came calling? Really bad people. And what if he had a past? And what if...?

I started to throw the idea around and pick it up by its ears to see if it squealed. I did a little research and yes, it could work. I worried a bit about what I was setting out to do to Pat, the placid, kind man with a Pioneer badge who'd done nothing to deserve being turned into a gun-toting leviathan. And then I got over it and started writing. That's the trouble with this writing thing, it tears away your morality and leaves you stealing people, plucking this trait from here, that sentence from there.

Don't ever chat to a writer. Seriously. You just can't trust 'em. You never know where your unplucked nasal hair, kipper tie and Bootle accent is going to turn up next...

A Decent Bomber And Rambling About Irish Life

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The yard light snapped on. Pat peered out, but the yard was empty. The dog was still by the range, her long snout on her paws. Her steady brown eyes regarded him.

‘Sure, Mikey. No, nothing at all, I have everything I need.  Sure I will, of course. Take it handy now, will you? Give my love to Anne. I will, I will. Goodbye, Mikey.’

Pat replaced the handset. Motioning the dog to stay, he lifted his coat from the hook and stepped outside. The harsh light glittered on the puddled ground. Pat stood on the threshold, scanning the yard but nothing moved in the hazy wetness of the South Tipperary winter night. He sniffed the air, a hint of turf from the hummock of sods tied over with blue plastic sheeting by the wall. He’d footed his own turf these past twenty years. Still a strong man, he was nevertheless finding it harder. Sixty this year, by God. On a whim he went back into the kitchen and lifted the white plastic feed bucket he used to carry the turf indoors. He would have his ease and a fire with a hot whiskey tonight. He went back outside, pulling his heavy coat around him.

Pat plucked aside the tarpaulin and dumped the musty oblongs into the bucket. Straightening, his hand on his back, he was stilled by the strong sense of a presence he felt when the yard light came on. He pushed the kitchen door open with his back and dropped the bucket just inside. He whistled for Kirstie. She bounded past him.

He strode along the wall of the house, following the edge of the light. He wanted to call out, just for the reassurance of sound. The darkness beyond was absolute, no light pollution here on the hillside, his farm the only building for a mile and more around. Kirstie returned to pad by his side. The cow shed was all bovine warmth and hay. The cows shifted, their tails swishing and hooves thumping dully on the muddy concrete.

Back into the drizzle, past the milking shed. The dog whined, pushed ahead then halted, growling. Pat shouted. ‘What’s your business?’

Sometimes it was pretty hard trying to squeeze my head into a winter's night in South Tipperary or a drizzly Dublin day. Surrounded by blue skies, sand and sun there were times when the smell of turf smoke and the sound of rain dripping from rooftops would come easily and times when it was maddeningly elusive.

I was frequently rescued from this dilemma by a Grooveshark playlist put together by bro-in-law Brian. You just slip on the cans, hit play on the iPad and, yessss, here we are again. I'm sure someone cleverer than I would identify it as a form of neuro-linguistic programming - a sort of proto-Pavlovian experience, but it worked like a wonder. Dropkick Murphys, Thin Lizzy,  The Stunning, Fight Like Monkeys, The Frames and others would propel me back to the drizzle and dark of an Irish night, the creak of a farmyard door and feet on flagstones, a turf fire and a hot whiskey.

Music's always been a big deal for me writing, a given tune playing in the car while I'm thinking about a scene will influence the way things develop; sometimes a piece will shape the development of a whole chapter or sub-plot. L'autre Endroit by Silence shaped the Aleppo souk scenes in Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy more than I did, while George Winston's music created the moods of Olives - A Violent Romance as surely as if he'd been tapping the keys on my notebook.

The winter countryside in Ireland still smells of turf fires and people still 'foot' their own sods of turf up in the bogs. It's back-breaking work, little pyramids of turf left out to dry and then stacked in reeks by the side of the house or in a shed for winter. You can buy Bord Na Móna briquettes, but they're not the same, although one bloke is gleefully selling them to the Americans for a staggering $49 a bale so their houses can 'smell like Ireland'. There's no smell quite like the smell of turf, mind.

Of course, all this talk of turf fires and whiskey leaves one open to the accusation of writing up life in Ireland as a 'Darby O'Gill' sort of thing, especially when you're talking to city types. I recall one Dublin paper snootily referring to Tipperary-born comedian Pat Shortt as 'the hick comedian Shortt', as if Ireland needed to excise its rural character or was in some way ashamed of its 'culchies'.

Shortt's 'hick' comedy is, although admittedly and unabashedly slapstick, remarkably observed and enjoyed precisely because we've all met 'mountainy men', loudramans stuck to the local bar and the other characters that populate the enjoyable world of his Tipperary village of Killinaskully. Here's a taste of the stuff - a warning, you might find this utterly impenetrable.

But the one thing you're guaranteed to find in A Decent Bomber* (apart from bombs, of course) is rain. When we were married, in June, our wedding day was the first sunny day of the year. And one of the first quaint madnesses to strike me visiting Ireland was someone looking out across a landscape of unremitting drizzly grey and proclaiming, 'Soft day, thank God.'

* Available now on pre-order from all good book retailers such as Amazon.com. Ahem.

A Decent Bomber

Back in February, I glibly declared here on da blog, A Simple Irish Farmer was finished. This turns out to have been deeply premature as today, the 19th September, I actually finished it.

In the meantime I have wailed, gnashed and generally hooned around wearing sack cloth. I have written another book (a psychological thriller called Birdkill) and spent a lot of time not working on the book about an IRA bomber pulled out of retirement which I have come to title A Decent Bomber after someone in publishing who knows that she's talking about told me ASIF was the pantsest title she had ever heard for a book.

Beta reader feedback, together with the need to fix some things in the book that simply didn't work that well and which made it a weaker and less enjoyable read than it should be, meant I had quite a bit to do. In fact, this has generally been my experience with my books so far - Olives is a markedly different book to the one I finished back in 2004, while Beirut needed a total restructure following its reader's report and Shemlan lost 30,000 words to that slash-happy servant of evil, editor Gary Smailes.

So now A Decent Bomber has gone out to a bunch of agents in the US, mainly because the UK bunch have an aversion to Irish books. And, depending on what happens with them, it'll likely be publishing in December.

In the meantime, both A Decent Bomber and Birdkill's covers are gracing my lovely website as I phase out my various book websites and consolidate all there.

So now you know.

Fitzpatrick's Pub in Carlingford

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had reason to dip into that long-defunct food blog, The Fat Expat, this evening. I found my recipe alright, but I also found an old review of Fiztpatrick's fine public house near Carlingford.

And it made me wonder for how much time I managed to make - back in the day - for posting things to blogs: my way of compensating for the journalism I was no longer doing and the book writing I had paused as I worked out what the hell it was that publishers actually wanted (something I still, clearly, find challenging).

Anyway, this is the review I wrote of Fitzpatrick's back in 2009 - just as valid today as it was six years ago...

Eating in Ireland is truly a roller-coaster ride that lurches easily from (if you’ll excuse the term) feast to famine. When it’s good, it’s very, very good but when it’s bad it’s usually so bad that it’s an experience in itself. Sometimes the simplest things delight – bacon, cabbage and potatoes, the national dish, sounds awfully plain, but at its best it’s a revelation: a golden ‘floury’ spud, tranches of steaming pink, tender bacon and a pile of slightly crunchy, slightly salty cabbage cooked in the bacon water and running every gamut of green from the pastel light green of sun shining through winter surf to the deep green of the fresh fields in the spring.

Parsley sauce is a love it or hate it experience, but I love it, curly parsley chiffonaded into a butter-rich creamy thick sauce that drops rather than pours.

And then there are the awful disasters – these days from Irish chefs treading the same well-worn paths of wretchedness that the Brits have already blundered along - stupid cack-handed melanges of ‘Thai-style’ spices imposed on ingredients that deserve more respect, awful attempts at food with ‘molecular’ influences and, unforgivably, ‘nouveau Irish’ food – piss-poor attempts to serve classic Irish dishes in plates of clashing flavours and colours that revolt rather than delight.

This, then, is the gastronomic wilderness that is Ireland post ‘Celtic Tiger’ - it’s a dangerous place, people, a country in transition... You will always find Cork’s Ballymalloe, the mother-lode of Irish cookery, a place of wonder.

But I found an almost equally wonderous thing near Carlingford – a pub that looks so cod-Irish from the road that anyone but an American would shudder and pass it by. And yet the locals flock there in their hundreds, Les Routiers has slapped its mark on the place and so many awards decorate its walls you can almost see them in the sea of mad memorabilia that covers every surface – horizontal and vertical alike. And I include the ceiling – you have to duck at times to avoid being brained by low-hanging beams festooned in brass pumps, irons, cameras and, well, just stuff really.

Fitzpatrick’s pub should be a disaster. It’s famous, bang on the tourist trail and decorated outside with flowerbed jokes, bicycles, baths and bedsteads. They pour Guinness with a flourish of shamrock on the ‘head’, for God’s sake. Eat there. It’s expensive (you’d better be ready to shell out €30 for a main) but I loved it. When food makes me laugh, I know I’ve ‘arrived’ – and I laughed my way through dinner at Fitzpatrick’s.

We ate in the restaurant (a small area to the back of the huge, labrynthine pub) which has its own separate kitchen and a ‘local’ chef. The main kitchen had a chef from Newry, but we decided not to take the foreign food. Service to begin with was a bit patchy – our Sancerre came warm and with a lot of mucking about with the glasses, but eventually things settled down and the Fleurie that followed was a delight. The wine list is basic, smartly compiled and good.

Breads were offered around, Irish brown, white, garlic and others – and then the kitchen sent out a tiny bowl of vegetable soup as an ‘amuse geule’ – a little taste of warm, mushroom-dominated thickness that was just right for the rainy night. I took a starter of pan-fried scallops and black pudding, purposefully courting disaster. I have always hated ‘surf and turf’ dishes, believing (perhaps perversely) that if God had intended beef and shrimps to be in the same place he’d have arranged things that way rather than separating the two environments quite so effectively.

It was really good. It would have been stunning and world-class if the scallops had been slightly less cooked, had spent a couple of minutes less on the pass under lamps. But the black pudding was rich, crumbly and served with a creamy slightly sharp sauce that did it proud, almost a béarnaise but not quite. I was grinning by now, and it wasn’t the excellent Sancerre alone. Other starters taken included breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, which were pronounced good but would have been better fried and served dry rather than buttered as they were. Odd that you could get a black pudding scallop starter right and muff a breaded mushroom dish, but there you go.

My main was classic stuff – an 8oz fillet steak served on a celeriac mash (note no horseradish addition to the mash, thank God. Horseradish mashes are an invention of the devil) with a black truffle sauce and foie gras. I thought I’d go for the light option, obviously. It was impeccably executed – a delight. The steak beautifully done and the little decorations of foie gras were fried off so they were crisp outside and yet wobbled, the sauce was rich and dark, pungently contrasting the rich, buttery mash and it was all topped with crisp onion rings in a light batter. The fries that came along with it were fat, crisp and floury when cut. A bowl of crisp, green spring vegetables with a rich cream sauce and another of new potatoes in butter arrived for each pair of diners. Others had sirloin steaks, a plainer serving of huge and beautifully cooked steak and then there were plates of fresh sea-bass.

Desserts came with an attendant cardiologist. I passed and selflessly ordered an Irish coffee (yup, a shamrock of brown sugar was dusted on it. I forgave them) but others took silly things like a walnut and banana crumble tart: rich, warm and gloopy, swimming in a crème Anglais, apple tart and ice cream and the ‘special’, organic strawberries and strawberry ice cream served in a little brass bucket alongside strawberry compote and cream. It looked outré, chi-chi and crass and tasted divine.

We went off to the bar for icy glasses of Tyrconnell (Ireland’s finest single malt and a whisky that eclipses much that Scotland offers, IMHO) afterwards. Because if you’re going to be this indulgent, you might as well go mad. Good wine, outstanding food and our insanely opinionated waitress, Carrie - part entertainment and part expert guide to the menu, women's hurling and the delights of working in a restaurant with the boyfriend (‘the boyfriend’, the barman, was of course stopped and shown off to us, to his horror) meant that we all agreed our evening in Fitzpatrick’s was a one-off, a memorable evening of excellence in a convivial, warm place filled with laughter, cheer and delight.

Book Research Is SUCH a Drag...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There comes a time when some form of reality has to intrude into writing novels, usually when you feel someone with access to the Internet is going to bother to work out if a fifty metre luxury yacht with such and such engines would take three days to go from Northern Spain to Malta, whether turning left from the main Dead Sea to Amman highway would take you to Bethany now there's a dual carriageway in place and you'd actually have to take a U-turn or indeed if you can actually buy terminal cancer drug Roxanol over the counter from a Lebanese pharmacy.

Researching Olives - A Violent Romance took huge dedication and involved drinking Martinis in the Four Seasons Amman, sploshing about smoking Cohibas in the Dead Sea and necking red wine in conservatories overlooking the rain-swept streets of an Amman winter. I had to eat sunny Mezzes overlooking the Golan Heights and wander around the warm spring streets of Madaba before lunching on pan-fried potato, eggs and Mediterranean herbs washed down with icy cold beers. It was hard, hard, hard people.

Still reeling from the exertions and huge personal distress I had to invest in Olives, researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was breathtakingly difficult. Walking the city's streets with a variety of highly attractive and personable companions, pottering around the Mouawad museum and investing many selfless hours in exploring the labyrinthine bars of Gemmayze, Monot and Hamra were nothing to the long, hard hours of toil drinking in Raouché, wandering the sun-dappled corniche sipping little cups of piping hot espresso from Uncle Deek's and, of course, eating a huge amount of stuff in the name of veracity.

You'll begin to appreciate I have Suffered For My Art. And if that weren't enough, writing Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy took me into the mountains above Beirut for long AlMaza-laced lunches sipping sweet chai nana as my companions sat around puffing shisha in the balmy late afternoon, bees and cicadas competing to provide the soundtrack to our panoramic view of the blue city far below - let alone forays into Aleppo's tragically destroyed C14th Ottoman souk. The sweet days foraging around Tallinn and nights chasing hot plates of rich stock with bobbing islets of pelmeni down with iced vodka were agony, I can assure you. Agony.

So you'll understand the sacrifices I'm about to make in Belfast's pubs and its finest hotel, the endless journeys across Ireland's green sward to possibly the best restaurant in the world and other terrible hardships I'm currently putting into A Simple Irish Farmer. Interviewing an IRA man who did 15 years of a 27-year sentence in Long Kesh, part of the game plan, is probably the nearest thing to real 'work' I'll have ever devoted to researching a book. I'll try not to let the platters and pints distract me. Honest...

Salmon Fishing In The Emirates

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So it's official. A company is to develop an on-shore salmon farm in Western Abu Dhabi, chilling sea water and using 'recirculating aquaculture' techniques to farm the fish in tanks cooled to 13 celsius. Reuters reports on the story here.

The 500,000 square metre farm is to be developed in two phases at a cost of a tad over $27 million and will produce 4,000 tonnes of fish a year in its final phase.

They're looking at a UAE market of around 1,000 tonnes of salmon a year, currently airfreighted here from Norway and Ireland at a cost of something like $4-5 per kilo. Other gulf countries will take up the rest of the crop.

The company behind the scheme, Abu Dhabi fish farming and production company 'Asmak', isn't kidding. It already has major farming operations in the Gulf, with farms in Saudi Arabia and the UAE currently producing over 2,000 tonnes of fish a year - and a processing, distribution and 'value-added products' business.

There are major concerns about the health risks associated with consuming farmed salmon, particularly given the diet farmed fish are fed and the way it introduces toxins into the fish which we, in turn, consume. The furore really kicked off ten years ago with a scary study by Albany University which recommended eating very little farmed salmon indeed to avoid increased risk of cancer. There has been huge debate recently in Norway following advice issued to pregnant mothers to avoid eating farmed salmon - which brings the Norwegians in line with UK health advice, incidentally.

I give you this link to the story in the Shetland News. I love the Shetland News strapline "Great is the truth and it shall prevail".

Some of the media round here could do with a touch of that...

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what Asmak intends to feed its fishies. Shame none of the local media covering the story asked... but then they just hacked the Reuters piece into make-up.

Golly - it's de little people!

Croikey! We have been tipped off by The Tipperary Voice, which reports on the multi-million visitor website irelandseye.com, which has set up a secret Leprechaun spotting webcam in a field overlooking a fairy ring in the Glen of Cloongallon near Thurles in the County Tipperary. Connected through a mobile 'phone, the hidden camera has driven traffic to the point where, last St. Patrick's Day, the site's server manfully tried to cope with over a million page views then crashed. The culprits, apparently, were de Yanks: according to irelandseye.com's John Murphy (quoted, you understand, by de Voice), Americans "have a distorted view of what leprechauns are and think that shamrocks have four leaves."

The Internet is a wonderful place.